"In Medicine Words"

[phrase from dg nanouk okpik]

            You drive into a meaning made of trees.

            Or not exactly trees.  It is a sense

            Of running through and under without let,

           

            Of glimpse and dapple.  A life all trace and skim

            The car has vanished out of.  A fanned nape

            Sensitive to the millionth of a flicker.

[Bold mine,  from Seamus Heaney, “The Road At Frosses,” in Simon Rae [Ed.], The Orange Dove Of Fiji

           

In woodland, gaze into a tree.  Any tree.

But…not exactly.

Open tree to a larger name, simple, eased as if you were opening a meadow gate, not intellectual—

“Plant,” or to “flora,”

And the, still eased, open “Plant” to “aliveness,”

And a sensate flood of joy washes in.

Even in the slightest breeze, the quiver of leaves.

Profound, detailed sensitivity dancing all about you—“ the millionth of a flicker” everywhere

“Tree” could have been different.

Tree might have evolved to be hardened. Crustose, like lichens, walled, stump-like.

But tree is an open channel, another form of rivering:

Starlight into mass and upswelling hydrology and mineral and aliveness.

And even more is offered in this aliveness overflowing the bowl—

Insects and the prayers/songs/canticles of birds and microbial life and on and on.

And what are these birds?

“Bird” swelling to “Fauna” swelling to “aliveness.”  

The commonplace name of everything contains a wide-open medicine word.

A shamanic quality.

It is not old, but rather enduring and unending eternal.

In each event and in each common word is a medicine word if we are up to it, if we are really post-industrial and post-modern and reaching toward our human potential.

In older days, living amongst trees and wild grasses,

Perhaps your aunty, swirling the iron skillet on the fire sees sparks

And remarks that somewhere there must be a war,

Old skillet and fire and spark had something to say. [p. 98]

Or to optimize the potato crop, the children might have been admonished

To release parts of themselves, [p. 6]

On in personal names [not “I’m number 1 type of names” or names picked off a popular list, but rather naming related richly to aliveness and sometimes self-depreciating or incident–related because self was not central]: Fred Bloodclot Red, Weasel Heart, Louise Stabs-in-the-Back, Bumblebee . [pp. 82, 84, 98]

[From Ray A. Young Bear, The Invisible Musician]

And so in sensing, perhaps allow yourself to transform concepts/thinking into “medicine words” and see what miracles might appear in that which seems known, overworked, and banal.  And most intriguing, perhaps find your life in it.